Top Spin 3

Few realize that underneath the generic exterior is a game development cycle of great complexity. It takes just the right balance of gameplay features – playability, physics, speed, challenge, and the overall feel of the game – to keep players from wondering, "Is this a tennis game or a next-gen version of Pong?" Top Spin 3 succeeded in these areas on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, which featured quick gameplay that was reminiscent of Virtua Tennis 3. The 2K Sports gem was less of an arcade title than Sega's latest, instead focusing more on the real-world challenges a tennis game could provide.

However, the same cannot be said for the sole handheld iteration of Top Spin 3, a scaled-down dual-screen version for Nintendo DS. The difficulty is high, forcing players to endure the most grueling tennis battles they've ever experienced on a handheld machine. Disappointingly, the similarities end there.

Simulation Imitation

Out of the box, Top Spin 3 looks like a meaty sports adventure with Career, Tournament, Mini-games and Multiplayer modes displayed on the main menu. Play Now is the common replacement for yesterday's Exhibition modes, and is also available for gamers who are eager to get down to business. Most of these offerings are well known by gamers, so I'll stick to the contents of the Career and Mini-game modes.

Career mode is the all-out battle for tennis supremacy, a game where you'll fight from the rank of dead-last to the rank of something people will remember. Choose from a male or female athlete, pick out some clothes, choose a country of origin, confirm a serve style, and mull over the decision to give your player a grunt (which he or she will recite every time you serve).

Upon your character’s completion the game jumps to the main Career mode screen where three playable options appear: Event, Tournament and Training. Tournament is the only portion where you play an actual game of tennis and is very similar to the external Tournament mode found on the main menu.

Training Day

Next up are the training games, which you must play – and win – to increase the stats of your tennis superstar. None of the challenges are particularly exciting (or challenging, for that matter), and some don't even relate to the game of tennis.

In Trap Game, you do not have access to a racket and will not see a single tennis ball. Instead, the other side of the net is sectioned into four colored squares. Two balls roll around those squares, and it's your job to run around one side and step on the colored circle that corresponds with the square, which will then open up, allowing the balls to fall through. Your goal is to drop the white ball (you'll get 100 points each time you do this) but not the black ball (you'll lose 50 points every time that ball falls through). If this sounds moderately interesting, then my text isn't conveying the tone in my voice. This is a short, easy, and most of all boring mini-game that does nothing but annoy players who came to Top Spin 3 for the sport it's supposed to be based on.

But it's not just the mini-games that disappoint; their presentation is equally depressing. Only three are available at the start of the career mode – the other five (which include goals as uninspired as whacking tennis balls at TVs and motor vehicles) are locked. After beating the first three, you won't be able to play them again until your rank increases. This leaves you with two options: Event and Tournament, which are also limited by an awkward setup. You can't enter Tournaments all the time – the game works on a weekly timeline, where every action equals one full week.

Tournaments are only available when the game feels like offering them. The rest of your time will be spent accessing the Event feature, which occasionally consists of regurgitated mini-games that serve no real purpose. Win or lose, your rank won't increase. But you will obtain a new item that'll just barely change your athlete's appearance. This might've been cool on a console but is hard to enjoy when the pixels are very tiny and there are more important things to think about.

Stranger still, the Event feature – which is often the only thing you can do to advance time – is most often bombarded with still images and repetitive messages. I'm not sure how, but it appears that my tennis star had two honeymoons in a six-month period. She broke her wrist numerous times and had to get that fixed (without any prior indication that she was injured), and takes two vacations a month, usually to the same group of places. These aren't choices – they're mandatory, and were also encountered when using a male tennis player. Rather than provide another realm for interactivity, the game merely throws another image onto the screen.

If you were to skip all this and stick to the external Tournament or Play Now feature, you might expect the series’ true beauty – great gameplay – to shine through. But that didn’t make it into this version. The game is fast and challenging yet surprisingly uneventful. No matter what you do, these back-and-forth battles are not exciting. The physics aren’t anything we haven’t seen before in a handheld tennis game, and the speed and responsiveness can’t compare to the PSP version of Virtua Tennis 3.

The developers tried to make up for this with a special boost feature that makes your athlete move twice as fast (temporarily, of course). Though it may seem appropriate for a DS game, which many expect to be lighter and more akin to an arcade experience, it does nothing to enhance Top Spin 3. Sadly, it does just the opposite. When boosting, your moves are too jerky to control properly, making the feature completely useless.